the situation in england is similar to that here in the seat of the empire. there are interest groups that have arranged for the rest of us to be forced into their particular box of choice. here and there its the charge of 'anti-semitism' that is used to beat us into line;


Gilad Atzmon is fighting a battle for free speech in England. Here’s why it matters in the United States. Atzmon was prohibited by a local council, Islington, made up almost entirely of Labour Party members, from playing the saxophone with his band the Blockheads. The ban followed a complaint from a far right Zionist, who in his own social media posts frequently disparaged and threatened the Labour Party and its leader as anti Semitic.
The complainant submitted a number of quotations from Atzmon taken out of context and cut and pasted for the desired effect. In fact, Atzmon is not an anti Semite, although he is critical of identity politics and particularly of Jewish identity politics (for example, the group Jewish Voices for Peace, why not All Voices for Peace?). The council concluded that Atzmon’s views were “at the lowest provocative and distasteful or at the highest anti-Semitic and racist”.
England has hate speech laws and with that conclusion one might have expected the council to file a complaint. But Atzmon has never been charged or even questioned under such laws. Through a convoluted series of rationales, the council, which does not have policing power, decided it had the right to prohibit a saxophone player from joining his band. The Labour Party seems to support the council’s decision: the Guardian reported that a spokesman for the Labour Party, without proof, labelled Atzmon a “vile anti-Semite“. Would Atzmon, a critic of Israel, been allowed to have the council deny admission to hard core Zionists? Could the council ban Muslims in burkas about whom Zionists complained?............http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=181241

the world is getting much stranger daily and in this piece you'll have the opportunity to discover more of that, in case you haven't already. for most of my years the sort referred to in this article was called a transvestite but apparently you can't call them that anymore and must use new words created in ways to make them feel good about their choices;

It's an amazing time to be alive, full of wonder and terror and confusion all mixed together in a soup of "what could possibly happen next?"  that keeps us all on our toes. Today's dose of insanity comes from a viral video of a transgender man who had a testosterone-fueled meltdown because someone called him "sir" in a GameStop in Albuquerque, New Mexico (video below). The minimum-wage employee who took the brunt of the all-male rage-a-thon should win Employee of the Year for trying his hardest to diffuse the situation.

It's interesting that his first outburst is at a woman standing off camera who calls him "sir," as if a woman, who can clearly see for herself what she is looking at, should have to cater to a man's particular fantasy and properly "gender" him according to his wishes and not according to her own eyeballs. This is the kind of insanity the left wants to foist on biological women in the locker room. Can you imagine encountering him when you're half-dressed and scared? Yikes.

The employee is going to be under fire if I know anything about the outraged tranny mob, so buckle up for a smear campaign to get him excused from his position and rendered unemployable anywhere else. This is despite the fact that he apologized to this tantrum-throwing man several times and began calling him "ma'am," as requested. If you're a six-foot-tall 200-pound man who likes to be called "she," shouldn't you have some compassion for others around you who have no idea? For all the guy behind the counter knew, maybe it likes to be called "xe" or "they." How is anyone supposed to know? (And it is more than a little humorous that he pulled out the "I'll show you a sir" line when it suited him to be a tough guy.)

The other problem here is the idea that one person can force others to comply with his personal fantasies. This man, who wants to be seen as a woman, is living in his own fantasy where he demands that others not involved in the same fantasy take part in it. This is not what a free society looks like. Mister Roid Rage (as I've taken to calling him in my head) has a right to live how he pleases and dress how he pleases but he does not have the right to force free people around him to take part in his internal delusions. If he wants to be around people who will look past the obvious and call him "her," then he should go to drag bars. But if he's shopping in the real world, he should expect that normies are gonna normie and call a man a man, not to belittle, but because that's the reality.......https://pjmedia.com/trending/cross-dressing-man-goes-full-roid-rage-after-being-misgendered-in-gamestop/

this exploration of where 'our' democracy went is involved and detailed. you will need to read this slowly to ingest it all, but when done you will know where much of it went and why we're really an oligarchy;


Authored by Rainer Mausfeld, translated by Terje Maloy via Off-Guardian.org,
The citizens are disenfranchised and conditioned to be politically apathetic consumers. In recent decades, democracy has been replaced by the illusion of democracy. New forms of organization of power and psychological methods for manipulation of our consciousness protect the powerful against the risks of democratic empowerment and strengthen their position.
Democracy and freedom. Two words that are charged with unheard-of social promises and that can release tremendous energies of change to achieve them. Today, hardly more than a shadow remains of the hopes originally associated with them. What happened? Never before have two words, to which such passionate hopes were attached, been emptied of their original meaning in such a socially far-reaching way. They have been falsified, abused, and turned against those whose thoughts and actions are inspired by them.

Democracy today really means an elected oligarchy of economic and political elites, in which central areas of society, especially the economy, are fundamentally removed from any democratic control and accountability; at the same time, large parts of the social organization of our own life lie outside the democratic sphere.
And freedom today means above all the freedom of the economically powerful.

With this Orwellian reinterpretation, these two words now have a special place in the endless dictionary of falsified words throughout history. With the poisoning of these two words, our hopes for a more humane society and a containment of violent ways of solving things are confused, clouded, broken and almost wiped out from the collective memory. The loss of the civilizing dreams associated with these two concepts makes it hard for us today to politically articulate an attractive, decent alternative to the prevailing power relations, or even worse, think of any at all.
Democracy, which was originally associated with great hopes for political self-determination and a safeguarding of internal and external peace, is left only as a formal shell in the real structure of society. Democracy has been reduced to a staged spectacle of periodical elections, where the population can choose from a given «elite spectrum». Real democracy has been replaced by the illusion of democracy; free public debate has been replaced by opinion- and outrage-management. The guiding principle of the responsible citizen has been replaced by the neoliberal ideal of the politically apathetic consumer.
Of the hopes associated with the concepts of democracy and freedom, only the empty words of a false promise have been retained by the powerful; with these words it is possible to effectively manipulate the consciousness of the subjugated majority.
International law has also today largely developed into an instrument of undisguised power politics. The self-declared ‘Western community of values’ has openly reverted to its almost religious belief in the effectiveness of violence, the wholesomeness of bombs and destruction, drone killings and torture, support for terrorist groups, economic strangulation, and other forms of violence that serve their purposes. This is a political fetishization of violence, whose effects can be seen all over the globe..........https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-28/mock-democracy

by now any regular attendees at this blog have noticed i have several 'favs' and kunstler is one posted here without any comment needed;


You had to love the narrative that the financial media put over about the 1000-plus point zoom in the DJIA on Wednesday: that pension funds were “rebalancing” their portfolios. It dredged up the image of drowning man at the bottom of the deep blue sea with an anchor in one hand and an anvil in the other, switching hands.
Thursday’s last minute 900-point turnaround was another marvelous stunt to behold. Somebody gave the drowned man a pair of swim fins to kick himself furiously to the surface for a gulp of air. The truth, of course, is that pension funds are sunk, however you balance their investment loads while they’re underwater. They over-bought stocks out of sheer desperation during ten years of near-ZIRP bond yields, and started rotating back into bonds as they crept above the ZIRP handle, and now with bond yields retreating, they’re loading up again on still-overpriced stocks that pretend to be “bargains.” Everybody knows that this will not end well for pension funds. Glug Glug.
The financial press and their red-headed step-siblings in the regular news media seem to think that getting rid of Mr. Trump will power the perpetual bull market into an Elon Musk nirvana of Martian vacations, hyperloops, and another chapter of US world domination — with Wonder Woman running the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spearheading an army of eunuchs. The New York Times made yet another pitch for impeachment today (Friday) in an editorial by the revered swamp fossil Elizabeth Drew, 83, who laid out everything but a credible case against the Golden Golem of Greatness. The newspaper makes itself more ridiculous each day in its furious gyno-narcissistic hysteria......http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/which-side-are-you-on/

the z man asks some good questions here and provides evidence for those questions. it wraps around charlottesville in many ways as that was a charade created by the 'authorities' in that town and no one  polled us citizens to see what we thought. a few made a decision without the input of those involved, as happens all the time here in the empire, and then we're told its for our own good, or a variation of that excuse. its the old saw of pissing down our back and telling us its raining;

By What Authority?

Posted on December 27, 2018

When you start out in your life, you have no conception of right and wrong, for the same reason you don’t understand string theory. Babies start out with the absolute minimum of knowledge to live. Just as you had to learn to tie your shoes, you had to learn the difference between right and wrong. There are things you should not do and things you should not say. Similarly, there are things you should say or do. Morality is the set of social rules you initially learn from your family and then from your community.
Morality comes from authority. The reason why you accept the moral instruction of your parents is they are your parents. It may be that you are programmed to accept them as moral authorities or simply that they are the default moral authorities in your life as you grow up. Similarly, maybe you accept the morality of your community, because it is what your parents accept. If there is a conflict between what you learn at home versus what you learn outside, you have to decide who is the moral authority.
This is what experts and theologians call “the obvious.” Morality is the code of conduct of your community. For most of human history, the moral authority was the religion of the people. The holy men of the religion, perhaps relying on an oral tradition or written texts, would shape and enforce the moral code of the people..The check on the holy man was that everyone knew the rules and the source of the rules, things like stories and legends, so he could not just wing it. He had to live within the code too..........http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=15951

i can't remember how long its been since i had any trust in 'our' government. i do know that putin increasingly seems to be much more honest than any i've seen here since the cia killed jfk. the following was sent by a friend earlier and i post it here;


Russian businessman Viktor Bout, jailed in the US on accusations of being an international arms dealer, said he won’t smear Russia’s honor in exchange for any type of deal with the American justice system.
There was talk about me telling the US authorities about corruption in the Kremlin. I replied: ‘What do I have to do with it at all and how am I supposed to speak about something that doesn’t exist?’
Such offers were made to him “on numerous occasions” by lawyers aligned with the US side, Bout said in a public telephone conversation with TASS.
The legal eagles also “loved talking about this with the family; with my wife, proposing different options, including a green card,” he added.
However, the entrepreneur said that exchanging him for any of the US citizens accused of crimes in Russia was never on the table.
Also on rt.com Revolution in US is inevitable, says jailed Russian businessman Viktor Bout
Bout has been in custody for a decade now, after being arrested in 2008 in Thailand during an American sting operation. He was eventually convicted in the US in 2012 on a charge of conspiring to kill American citizens, by allegedly selling weapons to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and was handed 25 years in prison.
As for any deals with the American justice system and what it really is – the American justice system isn’t just deaf and blind, but, apparently, out of its mind.
Before hanging up, Bout expressed “full confidence” that someday he’ll be back in Russia. The 51-year-old has always maintained his innocence and insisted that he has only been involved in legitimate cargo business.......https://alethonews.com/2018/12/28/us-offered-my-family-green-card-if-i-accused-kremlin-of-corruption-jailed-russian-businessman/

i found this years ago and saved it for several reasons, most of which may be obvious, thinking it would one day provide a place from which to write a more focused article for my local fishwrap. i didn't write a letter so focused but have used this as a thinking platform on occasion, and here it is for you to consider;

Our owners encourage you to agree to the following;

I won’t oppose any authority.

I will consume endlessly.

I will believe everything the “official” media describe.

I will accept all regulations even though I didn’t vote on them.

I will work longer hours and accept higher bills.

I will continue accepting the false promises that advertising presents.

I won’t protest in any form.

I will continue to accept wars and poverty.

I will continue to accept corruption and rule by a rich minority.

I will continue to believe that I can’t make a change.

I will suppress my true self to fit into this materialistic society.

I won’t stand up for what I believe to be right.

I will argue that this is just the way it is.

I will do what I’m told.

Ongoing methods towards Americanfascism;

Name a threat.

Establish secret prisons.

Develop paramilitary forces.

Spy on ordinary citizens.

Arbitrarily detain citizens.

Target key individuals.

Control the press.

Label dissent treason.

Weaken the rule of law.

Disarm the citizens.

Most people don’t have time to investigate every government claim. Even with the big ones; people don’t have time to re-think them in detail. They sense the personal cost, knowing if they ever discovered that they’ve been lied to deliberately, they’d lose faith in government. It’s like abandoning your religion; the costs are high. To abandon faith in the official line means admitting that you had previously fallen for a grand deception. You were played the sucker. You were, in Lee Harvey Oswald’s words: a “patsy”.

“Your government” claims the right to take over your relationships with your children or with your spouse. They’ve forcibly set themselves as the judge of your marriage; they took the right to steal your children and to force you to do business, or not do business, with whomever they specify. The claim of the intruders; “We’re doing this for your own good” doesn’t change the fact that they’re controlling your relationships by force.

Having come from a family correctly split by court order due to abuse I still find it crazy to imagine that outsiders have any right to control our families, yet that’s what’s done to us. We allow this because once people see official abuse as normal, and everyone around them accepts the “official crime”, they do too.

Harriet Tubman, escaped slavery, and then made dozens of trips back into slave territory and freed hundreds more, wrote: If I could have convinced more slaves that they were slaves, I could have freed thousands more. If it was hard to convince Southern slaves that they were slaves, this problem is significant. People can come to see nearly any type of abuse as normal and once they do, they usually defend their previous choices. Agents of the status quo always resort to intimidation and confusion. The answer to these abuses is moral clarity.

The state clearly inserts itself into our relationships by force. What holds people back from facing this obvious conclusion is fear. Not so much fear of punishment, but a fear of facing the truth within ourselves.

Neither our marriages nor our families, not to mention business relationships, are really our own. An armed referee stands above them, carrying a permanent threat of force. How well could you raise your children with an armed neighbor following you around and enforcing their will?

This isn’t a wild example; it differs from reality only in that the enforcer’s presence is in your mind, rather than in physical form and if the enforcer is notified, he will show up in physical form. Children are stolen from parents nearly every day, and not just when the parents are monsters. We all know this, and fear of the enforcer is very real to us.

The sort of law now existing in America provides two categories of persons: Those above the law: “our government” and its agencies, including NSA, FBI, DOD, etc.; Wall Street and government contractors who are never prosecuted for their crimes; the rich who are politically connected and can succeed legally against anyone simply by throwing money at lawyers, and you.

Everyone else is below the law, living in constant fear of getting sued and stripped of their savings, or arrested, intimidated into accepting a plea bargain, and locked up. You can now be detained indefinitely without charge, kidnapped from anywhere in the world, transported to a “black site” and tortured. You can be put on trial without being informed of the charge and convicted based on evidence that is kept secret from them. Your communities can be placed under martial law without cause and you can be shot on sight without provocation of suspicion of wrongdoing.

In an ideal world, cops would do nothing except protect people from thieves and attackers. In the real world, however, far more injustice, violence, torture, theft, and outright murder have been committed by “law enforcement,” than has been committed in spite of it.

Watch some documentaries about some of the atrocities committed by the regimes of Stalin, or Lenin, or Chairman Mao, or Hitler, or any number of other tyrants in history. When the jackboots are about to herd innocent people into cattle cars, or gun them down as they stand on the edge of a ditch, and then ask yourself, “When should you shoot  back?” Keep in mind; the evils of those regimes were committed in the name of “law enforcement” And as much as the statement may make you squirm, history would have been a lot less gruesome if there had been a lot more “killers” around to deal with the state mercenaries of those regimes. Ask an American Indian if you can find one.

Voting is meaningless and will change nothing. The corruption is too deep. The existing crap must be removed before there’s a chance to put this country on some sort of sustainable path. That won’t happen through “voting” but in the streets, on future battlefields, within our borders. The entirely predictable implosion of our corrupt financial system will be the trigger. It might happen tomorrow or it might happen in five years, but it will happen.

People around the world are waking up to the manipulations and deceptions of the “official American story”. Instead of stopping their lies, our Empire’s imperial masters keep pumping up the lies. They must really think we’re stupid and in many cases they’re correct. Then again, if they can convince us that 19 pseudo-Muslims led by a terminal kidney patient in Afghanistan could outwit the world’s most advanced air defense systems and blow up three buildings with two planes, they have good reason to think we are stupid enough to believe almost anything.

We live in an expanding police state built on government inspired paranoia.